THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
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measures involving the expansion of governmental control. Except in
Russia, where capitalism was not far advanced, there has not been
a complete capitalist collapse, but in most countries a weakened
capitalism shares power with a greatly strengthened government. In
Nazi Germany capitalists survived only as they came to terms with
men whose power was political rather than financial, and British
capitalists may find themselves in the same position. Only in this
country is finance capital strong enough to challenge government di–
rectly, and even here finance capital was on the defensive for four–
teen years. To try to explain away these facts by calling government
the tool of the capitalists is to miss the significance of a far-reaching
historical trend.
As for the proletariat, the fact is clear that it has not come to
power as a result of capitalist decay. In Germany, in the early thirties,
capitalism was perilously weak, and there were strong parties that
claimed to lead the proletariat in the name of Karl Marx; but power
came into the hands of a relatively small group of persons, most of
them lower-middle-class intellectuals. What is even more significant,
the group that holds power in the Soviet Union, though of course
it claims to rule in the interests of the laboring masses, is only less
remote from the proletariat than was the Tsarist aristocracy. Not only
does this group enjoy a multitude of privileges; it controls a vast
machinery for imposing its will on the majority of the people. Many
of its members are not proletarians in their origins, and they are not
proletarian in their way of life or their interests.
As
a disillusioned Belgian Marxist, Henry de Man, pointed out
more than twenty years ago, Marx shaped his conception of the
working class to fit the role it was required to play in
his
scheme of
things. Look at the picture of the proletarian in the Communist Mani–
festo: he has no property; he has no family life; he has been "stripped
of every trace of national character"; to
him
law, morality, and reli–
gion are "just so many bourgeois prejudices." This is not the worker
we have known in America, nor can it be argued that such a prole–
tarian as Marx describes has ever or anywhere been representative.
Moreover, it is doubtful if a completely degraded proletariat would
be capable of making a revolution. Revolutionary leadership, as a rule,
has come either from the middle class or from the upper strata of
the proletariat, not from those workers who are most exploited.
There is a vast apount of discontent in the world, but it is not
peculiar to the proletariat, and it is not merely economic in its origins.
To be sure, there is dissatisfaction with economic conditions, but it is
